"JOSEPH ANDREWS" AND THE CONTROL OF THE POOR

Author(s): CHRISTOPHER PARKES

Source: Studies in the Novel , spring 2007, Vol. 39, No. 1 (spring 2007), pp. 17-30
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29533797

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JOSEPH ANDREWS AND THE
CONTROL OF THE POOR

CHRISTOPHER PARKES

Joseph Andrews (1742) is about the absence of charity in eighteenth

century England. Throughout the novel, Joseph is continually denied it-by
characters in a stage coach who will not allow him to enter, by innkeepers
like Mrs. Tow-wouse who do not want the good name of their establishments
ruined by poor vagabonds, and by Lady Booby who wants to deny him a
settlement in her parish. For the most part, scholars have argued that the novel
imagines the solution to the absence of charity as a return to a golden age in
which benevolence took care of the poor. Martin Battestin, for example, argues
that Parson Adams is the novel's moral center who appears out of place in a
world where charity and goodwill have eroded: "We may laugh at the parson's
good-natured innocence and bookish idealism, but his honest bewilderment
and shock at the great world imply a standard by which to measure the moral
degeneracy of his age" (Moral Basis 113). In other words, if community
leaders in the novel were more like the benevolent Adams, poor characters
like Joseph who must wander the English countryside, would not go wanting.
However, to read Fielding's two pamphlets on the issue of the poor
problem in eighteenth-century England, An Enquiry Into the Causes of the
Late Increase of Robbers (1751) and A Proposal for Making an Effectual
Provision for the Poor (1753), is to be struck by how little benevolism figures
in his solution. While scholars see Joseph Andrews as arguing for a return to
benevolism, the pamphlets argue for a network of county workhouses. The fact
that the pamphlets appeared a decade after the novel may be reason enough for
this discrepancy, but it is important to examine whether or not the arguments
of the pamphlets are relevant to our understanding of the novel, given that
both are concerned with the control of the poor. The purpose of this essay is
to show how the novel is poised between a nation in which the benevolence of

Studies in the Novel, Volume 39, number 1 (Spring 2007). Copyright ? 2007 by the
University of North Texas. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

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 18 / PARKES

the local patriarch is responsible for poor relief and a nation in which a larger
institutional framework is responsible for poor relief. While these two views
are traditionally opposed to each other-they are sometimes referred to as Whig
and Tory views (see Everett)-the novel does not definitively choose one over
the other. James Cruise characterizes the novel as schismatic and argues that it
"sputters in its social reform" (266). This is certainly the case with its approach
to poor relief. There are times when the narrative argues that benevolism is
antiquated and inefficient, such as when characters like Lady Booby and Peter
Pounce deny any responsibility for helping the poor, and times when it argues
that benevolism is alive and well in eighteenth-century England, such as when
Squire Booby arrives in the end to give Fanny her fortune and Adams his curate.
While the influence of benevolism on Joseph Andrews has been explored by
scholars, the influence of the workhouse has not (see Bender and Gladfelder).
As we shall see, there are indications in the novel that a more systematic, state
run system of poor relief would be an improvement over benevolism.
While it is beyond the scope of this discussion to provide a detailed
account of the complexities of poor relief in eighteenth-century England, it can
be said with some certainty that as the cost of poor relief increased, the Poor
Laws were used more and more by parish overseers to deny the poor charity;
laws designed to control the poor and give them relief were also used to further
stigmatize and marginalize them.1 The great contribution of Fielding's two
pamphlets to the poor problem issue is the way they argue for a nation that can
contain the poor and keep track of them. In his Proposal, he observes that the
great failing of the punishment of rogues and vagabonds is that the existing laws
are used for expulsion, a policy at odds with the nation's demand for labor.2 He
expresses the need to hold onto each individual: ".. .if it should be the interest
of a wretch in these circumstances to be banished from a country, where he
must steal or starve, it is scarce the interest of the public to lose every year a
great number of such able hands" (180). Punishing criminals by transporting
them, hanging them, or putting them out onto the road was to throw away a
valuable commodity that could be reformed and put to good use. Because of
this set of problems, Fielding unveils in the Proposal his plan for an enormous
county workhouse-one much larger than the usual parish workhouse-a
building designed to hold 5000 in one place. Here, the unemployed poor are
collected in one spot so that they become accessible to the employer. They
are constructed as a labor pool that can be accessed at all times according to
the demands of the economy. He writes, "The true reason.. .that the poor have
not yet been well provided for, and well employed, is that they have not yet
been drawn together" (173). In his scheme, out-of-work individuals are never
allowed to be outside the employment and workhouse system. It is not left to
the individual to get to his or her next place of employment. When a laborer's
term of employment is up, he or she is to be returned to the workhouse on
an exact date specified by the original employment contract (Proposal 158).

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 HENRY FIELDING / 19

Fielding's plan also calls for employment to be controlled by the state to

the extent that it is illegal for employers to hire a wandering laborer without
the proper documentation: "...it shall be lawful for any gentleman, farmer,
artificer, or tradesman, to employ any journeyman, servant, or laborer, of any
other parish or county besides his own, he having first obtained from such
magistrate, minister, or churchwarden...such pass as aforesaid..." (Proposal
150). According to the plan, a laborer's identity must be known to the local
authorities; it must be fixed inside a state system of employment and relief.
Previously, the Elizabethan workhouse or House of Correction was used
for expulsion rather than containment. It operated according to the "test"
method of relief, a method that became part of the Workhouse Test Act of
1723. Conditions were kept so bad inside the workhouse that no able-bodied
unemployed person would want to stay. Faced with such conditions, the
inmate would take to the road, meaning the parish could then absolve itself of
the responsibility of paying for the welfare of a sturdy beggar.3 Richard Burn
writes in his History of the Poor Laws (1764), that expulsion increased as the
cost of poor relief rose. Parish officers kept "an extraordinary look-out, to
prevent persons coming to inhabit without certificates" (211) because if such
persons remained undetected in a parish for forty days they had a legal right
to settlement and relief (see Marshall and S. and B. Webb). Whereas Burn
describes a surveillance network based upon expulsion, Fielding imagines one
based upon containment. His workhouse plan is the result of the recognition
that the poor problem must be dealt with from the standpoint of an enclosed
or finite system of space because, once someone is expelled, the next parish
down the road will only continue the process until what was once a valuable
commodity is lost forever.
Workhouses were nothing new when Fielding presents his, but his
is important for its size and, in particular, for the way it moves toward the
depersonalizing of relief. As Paul Slack notes, poor relief in the eighteenth
century "was a matter for face-to-face management by overseers among their
neighbours" (20), a matter that inevitably created much tension. Fielding's
workhouse is designed to relieve this local tension by centralizing relief,
by taking it out of the parish and administering it at a more disinterested,
county level; it transforms the unemployed poor from a burden on the local
parish into circulating commodities inside the larger labor market.4 Anthony
Brundage, in his study of the Poor Laws, acknowledges the significance of
Fielding's contribution to the poor relief arguments of the time: "Although
other reformers periodically suggested the county as the natural administrative
unit, most Englishmen were unwilling to countenance such a major overhaul,
preferring more moderate reforms that would maintain some semblance of
localism" (19).
In the Enquiry, Fielding is concerned with the creation of England as a set
of jurisdictions. He imagines a nation in which boundary lines all connect with

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20 / PARKES

each other to form a complete containment network. With such an organized

landscape England will, he argues, be able to control crime more effectively by
keeping watch over its populations; people will not be able to slip outside the
system into unregulated or liminal space. Interestingly, he claims that such a
system existed back in the time of Alfred whose laws were designed, he writes,
to "prevent the concealment of thieves and robbers" (83). After the time when
the English were "debauched by the example of those barbarians" (83) the
Danes, whom they fought in battle, Alfred divided the space of England in
order to make rogues visible to authority:

These evils were encouraged, as the historians say, by the vagabond state of
the offenders, who, having no settled place of abode, upon committing any
offence, shifted their quarters, and went where it was difficult to discover
them. To remedy this mischief, therefore, Alfred having limited the shires
or counties in a better manner than before, divided them into hundreds, and
these again into tithings, decennaries, or ten families.
Over every one of these tithings or decennaries, there was a chief called
a tithingman or burgh-holder, who had a power to call a court, and to try small
offences.... (83)

According to Fielding, Alfred arranged the geography of England systematically

by dividing it into legal jurisdictions. The limiting of the space of the nation
meant that there was no place a criminal could go to escape the law. Back
then, he writes, "a traveller might have openly left a sum of money safely
in the fields and highways, and have found it safe and untouched a month
afterwards" (85). Because the population was perfectly divided and settled
within a set of lines, private property was protected. Fielding imagines that a
set of jurisdictions will create new identities for people and property-identities
that are determined by both a relationship to authority and a fixedness inside
the administrative and institutional framework of England.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes how the European nation
states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries moved away from the
retributive institution to the rehabilitative institution; the carnival experience
of old Newgate prison, for example, was replaced by the architectural
efficiency of Bentham's Panopticon. The first step in such a shift was for the
nation to be imagined as an enclosed space, what Foucault calls a carc?ral
network. According to Foucault the carc?ral network produces the sense that
the individual is always within the bounds of the social order, that through
the grid-like structures of prisons, schools, and hospitals (and the web of
jurisdictions described by Fielding) the concept of liminal space-space that
represents an alternative to the dominant society-is eliminated. Fielding's
writing about the poor problem, with its emphasis on containment and
surveillance, is clearly part of this larger movement toward the transparent
nation-state. While scholars quite rightly caution against seeing eighteenth

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 HENRY FIELDING / 21

century England as anything close to all-powerful and all-seeing, this does not
mean that theorists like Fielding were not trying to imagine it as such.5 As Hal
Gladfelder notes in his analysis of the pamphlets, Fielding's obsession with the
control of the poor and working classes, "barely masks a sense of ideological
panic at the disorderliness of urban poverty" (165). But to be fair to Fielding,
even as the poor are commodified and controlled by his workhouse scheme,
they are clothed and fed; the pamphlets have an important place in the history
of modern social control and in the history of the modern welfare state.
The Proposal also outlines the Poor Law statutes that apply to persons
wandering about the countryside, statutes that can be used to better monitor the
labor force. In outlining the statutes, the Proposal also captures quite nicely
the position of Joseph Andrews as he sets out from London on his way to Lady
Booby's country estate:

...it shall be lawful for any of his Majesty's subjects to seize all suspicious
persons who shall be found wandering on foot, about the fields, lanes, or
highways, or in the streets of any of the towns or parishes of the said county...
and all labourers or servants, or persons of low degree, who, after the hour of
ten in the evening shall be found harbouring in any alehouse or victualling
house; and if such persons shall not give reasonable satisfaction to him or
them by whom he or she is apprehended that he or she belongs to the said
county...or if he or she belongs to any other county, or is then six miles
distant from his own habitation, and shall not produce a pass or certificate
signed by some magistrate, minister, or churchwarden.. .it shall be lawful for
the party apprehending to confine such person till he or she can be delivered
to the constable.... (149)

According to this passage, a character like Joseph should be immediately

apprehended. Joseph wanders about at night, he winds up naked and penniless
at alehouses, and he has no pass or certificate to validate his travels. When he
hits the road as a discharged servant, he is exactly the type of person Fielding
has in mind in his two pamphlets. He is exactly the type of sturdy young
laborer who needs to be controlled and monitored so that he does not go to
waste.
The narrative does make sure to draw attention to Joseph's violations
of the Poor Laws during his travels. Contrary to the Act of Settlement, he
proceeds to Lady Booby's country estate, where he hopes to reunite with
Fanny and marry, "instead of proceeding to the Habitation of his Father and
Mother" (48). After Lady Booby discharges him for refusing her advances,
he begins an essentially illegal course of action by not returning to his parish
of birth (although, as it turns out, his original parish is difficult to determine).
According to the Poor Law and Fielding's own Proposal, Joseph is to be
apprehended by the constabulary and returned to his original parish. Why then
is he not apprehended? The reason is that the narrative explores an England
in which the poor are neglected to such an extent that they can be lost forever;

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 22 / PARKES

it explores the inability of the landscape to contain the poor. In his analysis of
eighteenth-century fiction and property law, Wolfram Schmidgen notes that the
England of Tom Jones exists in an in-between state. He writes that the novel
reveals that the "boundaries between the ancient and the modern are not clearly
visible and the national still has not penetrated the local" (80). However, he
also notes that "the distance between the feudal past and eighteenth-century
institutions is eminently bridgeable..." (79). The same landscape exists in
Joseph Andrews. When Joseph sets about wandering the English countryside
he travels through an ancient, unenclosed landscape that is presided over by
local patriarchs, but the novel contains key reformative moments in which
an enclosed national landscape is emergent. It will be left to the end of my
discussion to see whether or not the novel's ending can effectively bridge the
gap between the ancient and modern Englands I have described.
It must be noted that unenclosed landscapes and frontier spaces are
vitally important to the adventure writer because without them there can be
no dangerous and exciting incidents. It is for this reason that Defoe has Moll
declare at the beginning of Moll Flanders (1722) that her unfortunate story
could not have occurred if she had lived in France where orphans are

...immediately taken into the Care of the Government, and put into an
Hospital call'd the House of Orphans, where they are Bred up, Cloath'd, Fed,
Taught, and when fit to go out, are plac'd out to Trades, or to Services, so as to
be well able to provide for themselves by an honest industrious Behaviour.
HAD this been the Custom in our Country, I had not been left a poor
desolate Girl without Friends, without Cloaths, without Help or Helper in the
World, as was my Fate. (8)

Moll indicates that her story is the result of England's lack of control over the
poor and the absence of a carc?ral network. Had she been under surveillance
from the beginning, she could not have fallen into the criminal underworld.
There is a certain generic instability in both Defoe's and Fielding's novels
as both writers argue for the elimination of liminal spaces even as their most
memorable episodes require them. Just as the local patriarch requires liminal
space so that power can be maintained through the ability to cast out and
exclude, so the eighteenth-century novelist requires liminal space to generate
narrative interest.
Judith Frank argues in her important study of the poor in eighteenth-century
fiction that servants in Joseph Andrews are liminal figures that operate between
rich and poor and "the leisure/labor divide" (167). Lady Booby's estate is
indeed a confused space where social roles are muddled and the classes not
properly distinguished. Lady Booby is Joseph's employer, his parish overseer,
and his potential lover, which leads to what Frank refers to as the "eroticization
of labor" (167). After she discharges Joseph for having refused her advances,
Lady Booby continues throughout the narrative to use the law to punish him

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 HENRY FIELDING / 23

and to keep him on the road. When he does eventually make it from London
to her country estate, she tries to expel him again by having Lawyer Scout
charge him with trespassing and the cutting of "one Hassel-Twig" (289) which
he offers to Fanny as a love token. According to the Poor Laws, the cutting
and gathering of wood by travelers is illegal in order to discourage squatters
and gypsies from living off the land and outside settled society,6 but the two
lovers have only cut one twig. The twig stands as an example of how the
law could be used to persecute the poor by keeping them on the road and
refusing them a settlement. Lawyer Scout articulates the period's reliance on
the expulsion of the poor as he declares, ".. .1 think we ought to have an Act
to hang or transport half of them" (284). He also tells Lady Booby that the
mere mention of her name to Justice Frolick will be enough to convict the two
lovers. Joseph's position as a servant highlights the extent to which poor relief
and the establishment of a settlement could become personalized. Lady Booby
is hardly a disinterested bureaucrat as she uses the law to punish those who
would spurn her advances.
The power of the local landowner is satirized when Lady Booby finally
returns to her estate after a long absence spent in London. The poor rejoice at
her arrival but the passage is loaded with irony, indicating that the power she
possesses is excessive:

She entered the Parish amidst the ringing of Bells, and the Acclamations
of the Poor, who were rejoiced to see their Patroness returned after so long
an Absence, during which time all her Rents had been drafted to London,
without a Shilling being spent among them, which tended not a little to their
utter impoverishing; for if the Court would be severely missed in such a City
as London, how much more must the Absence of a Person of great Fortune
be felt in a little Country Village, for whose Inhabitants such a Family finds
a constant Employment and Supply; and with the Off alls of whose Table the
infirm, aged, and infant Poor are abundantly fed, with a Generosity which
hath scarce a visible Effect on their Benefactor's Pockets? (277)

The poor it would seem are too dependent upon the scraps of Lady Booby's
table. If she should be gone to London, then they are neglected completely. The
country-house ideal is present in the passage as her estate forms the economic
and moral center of the community, but because of the potential for neglect
on her part, the passage looks in two directions; it looks back to the golden
age of the country-house ideal and asks Lady Booby to be a better landlord
and it looks forward to a system in which the poor will not be dependent upon
landlords who are often absent.
Peter Pounce is a local patriarch who has completely abdicated
responsibility for poor relief. He sees the poor as animals that can be managed
simply by putting them out to pasture or by letting them loose across the
nation. During his heated debate with Adams as they share a coach in book

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 24 / PARKES

3, he argues that any form of poor relief is completely unnecessary given the
pastoral abundance of the English countryside:

How can any Man complain of Hunger...in a Country where such excellent
Sallads are to be gathered in almost every Field? or of Thirst, where every
River and Stream produces such delicious Potations? And as for Cold
and Nakedness, they are Evils introduced by Luxury and Custom. A Man
naturally wants Clothes no more than a Horse or any other Animal, and there
are whole Nations who go without them.... (275)

Pounce is the kind of wealthy individual who takes no responsibility for the
poor, deciding that they can fend for themselves on the wastes and commons.
Like Lady Booby, he is either a character who shows the need for a better
class of patriarch or a character who shows the need for taking charity out of
the hands of private citizens entirely. Ultimately, the novel contains so many
neglectful characters like Lady Booby and Peter Pounce and so many false
philanthropists whose charitable acts come to nothing, that benevolism seems
dangerously unreliable. As Mr. Wilson tells Adams, he "experienced what is
worse than Poverty, or rather what is the worst Consequence of Poverty, I mean
Attendance and D?pendance on the Great" (215).
Even Adams's role as provider for the poor is fraught with difficulty.
He upsets his own household when he takes care of Fanny and Joseph, and,
according to his wife and daughter, he would give away the family's money
and belongings to anyone in need. They understand that his kind of charity
is unworkable, that it will impoverish them all. Again, it could be argued
that Adams tries to perform the work that should be done by someone much
wealthier, such as Lady Booby, but his daughter also points out that her father's
charity is not practiced disinterestedly. Just as Joseph is expelled by Lady
Booby because he is too handsome, so Fanny is relieved by Adams because
she is pretty: "Tndeed, Father, it is very hard to bring Strangers here to eat your
Children's Bread out of their Mouths.-You have kept them ever since they
came home; and for any thing I see to the contrary may keep them a Month
longer: Are you obliged to give her Meat, tho'f she was never so handsome?
But I don't see she is so much handsomer than other People" (322). His wife
tells him that he should be responsible only for his family: "it behoved every
Man to take the first Care of his Family; that he had a Wife and six Children,
the maintaining and providing for whom would be Business enough for him
without intermeddling in other Folks Affairs..." (306). His family understands
that poor relief practiced by private citizens is problematic. It is influenced
by personal feelings and calls into question the motivation of the benefactor.
Even Adams's wife, by pointing out that charity begins at home, is motivated
by self-interest; she turns against Joseph and Fanny because she is afraid that
by helping them she will anger Lady Booby: "She had long entertained hopes
of seeing her eldest Daughter succeed Mrs Slipslop, and of making her second

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 HENRY FIELDING / 25

Son an Exciseman by Lady Booby's Interest" (306). In Tom Jones, Squire

Allworthy's role as village patriarch is equally complicated. The villagers
believe the only reason he must be making Tom his heir is that he is secretly
the boy's father. It may be that Adams and Allworthy operate on a higher plane
of benevolence than more self-interested individuals, but their charity creates
as much hardship in the community as it alleviates.7
To some extent, the failure of Adams's brand of charity is connected to
his failure to navigate the English landscape. Just as he upsets the order of
his household, so he upsets the "natural" order in certain ways. He does not
observe the two-dimensional boundaries that create England as an integrated
spatial system. For example, in book 2 when Joseph and Adams first set out
together, Adams quickly loses Joseph because he has not looked back: "At
length, having spun out this Thread, and being now at the Summit of a Hill,
he cast his Eyes backwards, and wondered that he could not see any sign of
Joseph" (95-96). Adams then comes to a large puddle in the middle of the
road and decides he must wade through it, but in comical fashion he finds that
if he had simply looked around he could have avoided the water: "...he saw
no Method of passing unless by wading through, which he accordingly did up
to his Middle; but was no sooner got to the other Side, than he perceived, if
he had looked over the Hedge, he would have found a Foot-Path capable of
conducting him without wetting his Shoes" (96). If he had been able to read
the lines on the landscape-the hedges and footpaths-he would have stayed
on the path and saved himself a soaking. As the scene continues, his poor
navigation skills are shown to be dangerous and disruptive when he nearly
brawls with a passerby after asking him where an alehouse might be found.
Thinking Adams is mocking him because there is an alehouse right before
him, the man becomes enraged until a friendlier traveler defuses the situation
by informing him, "Friend, there is one within a Stone's-Throw; I believe you
may see it before you" (96). Certainly Adams comes the closest to being the
novel's moral center, but to some extent he shares the blame for the danger in
which he finds himself. As a myopic traveller, he cannot seem to navigate the
two-dimensional boundaries of the landscape and thus he almost receives a
beating. He is the good man out of place in a corrupt world, but he is also out
of place in a world that is becoming increasingly enclosed and marked out by
fixed boundaries.8
In book 3, a prospect scene occurs that demonstrates how, unlike Adams,
Joseph thinks in terms of the fixed boundaries of the landscape. Here, Fanny,
Joseph, and Adams have lost their way in the dark and find themselves at the top
of a hill. The prospect represents a dangerous liminal space within England's
geography: "...they saw far off several Lights scattered at a small distance
from each other, and at the same time found themselves on the Descent of a
very steep Hill. Adams's Foot slipping, he instantly disappeared, which greatly
frightned both Joseph and Fanny; indeed, if the Light had permitted them to see

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 26 / PARKES

it, they scarce would have refrained laughing to see the Parson rolling down the
Hill..." (193-94). His fall down the hill represents the upsetting of patriarchal
authority (see Everett). He falls because he is an old-style patriarch, but Joseph
carries Fanny down easily, leading the narrator to warn his female readers,
"Learn hence, my fair Countrywomen, to consider your own Weakness, and
the many Occasions on which the strength of a Man may be useful to you..."
(194). Joseph is physically strong certainly but his strength lies mainly in
his ability to read the landscape. He is shown in this scene to be acquainted
with the two-dimensional map of the nation when, after they have descended
the hill, the travelers encounter a river. Just as he does in the puddle scene,
Adams worries that they will have to swim across it, but Joseph who thinks in
terms of map space tells him, "if they walked along its Banks, they might be
certain of soon finding a Bridge, especially as by the number of Lights they
might be assured a Parish was near" (194). He leads them out of the common
field they are crossing and uses the infrastructure of the landscape to bring
them back to civilization. While the patriarch figure falls from his hill and
cannot navigate the two-dimensional structures of the landscape, Joseph keeps
them oriented and gets them to a settlement. His awareness of his position
within the nation's network of lines becomes the means of his rescue from the
liminality of England's geography and represents his principal attribute as a
hero. A similar scene occurs at the beginning of book 9 of Tom Jones where
Tom stands at the top of Mazard Hill and traces his way back to Somersetshire
which he has left behind. Unlike the Man of the Hill who has dropped out of
society to live on the wastes, Tom remains connected to the social network no
matter what scrapes and misfortunes befall him.
The dangerous nature of the undisciplined landscape is felt the most
when Fanny is off the road and attacked in the bushes. Fortunately and
coincidentally, Adams is present to save Fanny from her attacker, but when
the case comes before the magistrate, both are taken for rogues because they
look less respectable than the attacker who puts on a humble guise and tells
the court, "Gentlemen,... y ou are luckily come to the Assistance of a poor
Traveller, who would otherwise have been robbed and murdered by this vile
Man and Woman, who led me hither out of my way from the High-Road, and
both falling on me, have used me as you see" (141). That Fanny and Adams are
in the bushes in the first place means that the magistrate doubts their identities.
Adams's identity as a clergyman suddenly becomes unfixed as the magistrate,
thinking the Aeschylus is "Ciphers" (148), labels him a spy. As a private
citizen who must make up for the lack of a disciplined landscape, Adams falls
into liminal geography and his identity becomes unfixed; he becomes unknown
to authority.
The novel indicates that with an identity that is known to authority comes
protection and security. Its pattern of lost property, in which objects and people
return to their rightful owners because they have identifiable marks, can be

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 HENRY FIELDING / 27

seen as a model for the transparent nation-state. Early on in the novel when
Joseph is robbed by highwaymen and left in a ditch, he loses a little piece of
gold. He is able to reclaim the gold because it is marked. It is a "little piece
of broken Gold, which had a Ribband tied to it, and which he could swear
to amongst all the Hoards of the richest Men in the Universe" (64). Joseph
gets the gold back because it is identifiable in the eyes of the law. Likewise,
he is returned to his real father, Mr. Wilson, because he has the strawberry
birthmark. Wilson "no sooner saw the Mark, than abandoning himself to the
most extravagant Rapture of Passion, he embraced Joseph, with inexpressible
Extasy, and cried out in Tears of Joy, / have discovered my Son, I have him
again in my Arms" (339). While the strawberry birthmark is not exactly an
identity card or government number, it points the way to a modern nation-state
in which every citizen's identity is fixed inside a state bureaucracy.
Ultimately, Joseph conforms to the Act of Settlement when he ends up
back in the parish of his parents and settles next to his father, Mr. Wilson.
The ending reminds the reader that Fanny and Joseph have been rescued and
redeemed as valuable resources:

Mr. Booby hath with unprecedented Generosity given Fanny a Fortune of

two thousand Pound, which Joseph hath laid out in a little Estate in the same
Parish with his Father, which he now occupies, (his Father having stock'd it
for him;) and Fanny presides, with most excellent Management in his Dairy;
where, however, she is not at present very able to bustle much, being, as
Mr. Wilson informs me in his last Letter, extremely big with her first Child.
(343-44)

The narrative is complete when they are settled within their proper county,
when they are properly employed, and when they are reconnected to their
proper family network. Joseph is comfortably settled but he has had to survive
in a world that at every opportunity has tried to keep him out on the road
and marginalized. The law can be obeyed finally but only because of good
luck and coincidence and Joseph's map reading ability, not because authority
figures have realized the need to control and protect the poor.
Joseph's new estate may appear to be a liminal space much like the one
he inhabited as a servant-one between rich and poor and between leisure and
labor, to use Frank's terms-because here he is both a farm laborer and an
estate owner with a two-thousand pound fortune. His liminal position in Lady
Booby's household argued against upward mobility; it argued against the idea
that servants should personalize their relationships with the rich in order to
gain preferment. Joseph's estate, however, is not the confused space that Lady
Booby's was because the favors given to Joseph and Fanny come from within
their own enclosed family network. Squire Booby does not give them charity at
all because, as it turns out, Fanny is actually Pamela's sister. Joseph and Fanny
move up the social ladder because the squire takes responsibility for them and

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28 / PARKES

shares the family fortune. It is right then for families to take responsibility for
each other; what is not right, according to the novel, is when responsibility for
the poor is left to random favoritism. Joseph and Fanny have been elevated
to settled laborers by remaining inside the boundaries of the settled world and
they have been elevated to estate owners by family relations. Their settlement
does not disrupt the local community. The community can have no reason
to be jealous or to dispute their new status. Joseph's estate represents a clear
articulation of the role of public and private networks in poor relief. The state
and the family are responsible for relief; village patriarchs, local parsons, and
venal innkeepers are not. The estate eliminates the liminal space occupied by
the servant that allows him or her to achieve upward mobility and escape labor
only through personal entanglements.
Benevolism is still at work in the novel's ending, however, when Squire
Booby rewards the wandering peddler, the character who reveals the true
parentage of Joseph and Fanny and who saves Adams's son from drowning.
Because of the peddler's information, the squire rewards him by setting him
up as an "Excise-man; a Trust which he discharges with such Justice, that he
is greatly beloved in his Neighbourhood" (344). Mrs. Adams once hoped
that her second son would be made an exciseman by Lady Booby, but here
the wandering peddler is made a local exciseman. His appointment supports
benevolism as the peddler achieves upward mobility because a patriarch
prefers him. Unlike Joseph who is given a private estate by a family member,
the peddler is given a public office by a wealthy patron. If the development
of a carc?ral network signals a lessening of the power of the landed patriarch
then the squire's final benevolent act draws the narrative to a close with a
conservative gesture that reinforces the power of the patriarch to either include
or exclude. It must be noted, however, that the peddler is transformed by the
squire's benevolence from a liminal character into a modern bureaucrat. In
other parts of the novel this kind of favoritism produces envy and resentment
but there is none directed toward the peddler by the local community. Although
we cannot know for certain why his brand of justice makes him so beloved in
the neighborhood, we can guess that as someone who is not originally from the
area, he is not subject to the personal entanglements that make Lady Booby and
Parson Adams imperfect parish officers. We can also guess that the community
understands his merit and the debt that is owed to him by the three families he
has helped unselfishly. If Mrs. Adams's second son had been appointed to such
a position by Lady Booby, there would have been, perhaps, much jealousy and
public outcry. In the end, benevolism fixes the peddler's identity inside the
enclosed world as a liminal figure is made an administrator. The squire may
use his personal preference to reward the peddler but his benevolence operates
according to containment rather than expulsion and, in this way, the role of the
patriarch is transformed into one that operates more bureaucratically. It is not
that the novel has been waiting for the good man with deep pockets to relieve

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 HENRY FIELDING / 29

the poor. Rather, it has been waiting for responsible citizens to understand
the nation's need to keep track of the poor, to keep them enclosed within a
disciplined landscape. The novel's final act of benevolence does contain
within it, as I have indicated, great potential for social disruption and because
of this potential it represents an unstable bridge from the feudal past to the
institutional future.
Joseph Andrews tends, therefore, toward the structures and mechanisms
we find in Fielding's workhouse scheme. I have argued that Fielding brings
the novel form into a close relationship with the structures of the modern
nation-state. In its engagement with the poor relief problem, his novel sorts
out responsibility for relief and articulates the social conditions under which
England as a collection of disconnected, almost feudal communities can be
transformed into a modern bureaucratic state. But just as there is an instability
built into the novel's closing scene so there is an instability built into its form.
To be an exciting adventure story it must remain poised between enclosed
and unenclosed space, between the unimproved wastes of England and the
functional landscape of the commercial trade network. The modern England it
imagines must remain embedded in the narrative in a state of becoming.

LAKEHEAD UNIVERSITY, CANADA

NOTES

1 See Brundage, Dean, Himmelfarb, and Slack. Still valuable are S. and B. Webb and
Marshall; Burn is a valuable resource from the eighteenth century. See Nicholls for specific
Poor Law statutes.
2 The idea that there was a high demand for labor in the middle of the eighteenth century
is debatable. Fielding indicates in the Enquiry that manufacturing is not at full capacity but he
believes there is enough work to employ every poor person (59). Schmidgen notes that Fielding
does not call for new laws to be enacted: "Fielding did not demand new laws to cure the social
ill of 'wandering,' but advocated the strict enforcement of old laws" (79-80).
3 Brundage notes that "an 'offer of the house' would function as a self-acting test of
destitution" (12). Refusal of the house would identify the person as not destitute and therefore
not in need of relief.
4 Schmidgen argues that the concept of commodity circulation in eighteenth-century
economics has been over-emphasized by scholars. According to him, in the writings of Fielding
and Defoe commodities are still thought to be deeply embedded in local communities. While
his point is well-taken, Fielding sees the need in his pamphlets to remove the unemployed poor
to the more disinterested county level.
5 Linebaugh emphasizes what he calls "excarceration"-the ability of heroic criminal figures
like Jack Sheppard to escape authority.
6 The actual statute is 18 Eliz.c.7. The statute is carried on to 6 Geo.I.c.16. See Nicholls
2:7.
7 Schmidgen sees Allworthy's Paradise Hall as an ideal social model (92). Allworthy's
estate, however, is rather outmoded given that its lord is described as one who is "charitable
to the Poor, i.e. to those who had rather beg than work" (1: 38). Everett writes of Allworthy's
estate, "there is little sense of a cultivated benevolence diffusing well-being through a large
circle of influence" (29).

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 30 / PARKES

8 The enclosure movement was responsible for increased unemployment, particularly in

the last half of the century. Rural laborers were less in demand and took to the road looking
for work. Enclosure is not, however, at odds with Fielding's plans. His workhouse scheme, if
implemented, would collect these laborers and train them for other kinds of work. For Fielding,
enclosure of the landscape must work together with the enclosure of the poor.

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